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The Daily
, which was neither tabloidy nor serious, but instead a rather midmarket product like
USA Today
, was not very successful. But it did help create an odd-couple bonding between Jobs
and Murdoch. When Murdoch asked him to speak at his June 2010 News Corp. annual
management retreat, Jobs made an exception to his rule of never doing such appearances. James
Murdoch led him in an after-dinner interview that lasted almost two hours. “He was very blunt
and critical of what newspapers were doing in technology,” Murdoch recalled. “He told us we
were going to find it hard to get things right, because you’re in New York, and anyone who’s any
good at tech works in Silicon Valley.” This did not go down very well with the president of the
Wall Street Journal Digital Network, Gordon McLeod, who pushed back a bit. At the end,
McLeod came up to Jobs and said, “Thanks, it was a wonderful evening, but you probably just
cost me my job.” Murdoch chuckled a bit when he described the scene to me. “It ended up being
true,” he said. McLeod was out within three months.
In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he
believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re
blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and
conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive
people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this
is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.” Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like
how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer,” he said. “I’ve had some meetings
with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”
Murdoch later said he was used to people like Jobs complaining about Fox. “He’s got sort of a
left-wing view on this,” he said. Jobs asked him to have his folks make a reel of a week of Sean
Hannity and Glenn Beck shows—he thought that they were more destructive than Bill O’Reilly—
and Murdoch agreed to do so. Jobs later told me that he was going to ask Jon Stewart’s team to
put together a similar reel for Murdoch to watch. “I’d be happy to see it,” Murdoch said, “but he
hasn’t sent it to me.”
Murdoch and Jobs hit it off well enough that Murdoch went to his Palo Alto house for dinner
twice more during the next year. Jobs joked that he had to hide the dinner knives on such
occasions, because he was afraid that his liberal wife was going to eviscerate Murdoch when he
walked in. For his part, Murdoch was reported to have uttered a great line about the organic vegan
dishes typically served: “Eating dinner at Steve’s is a great experience, as long as you get out
before the local restaurants close.” Alas, when I asked Murdoch if he had ever said that, he didn’t
recall it.
One visit came early in 2011. Murdoch was due to pass through Palo Alto on February 24, and
he texted Jobs to tell him so. He didn’t know it was Jobs’s fifty-sixth birthday, and Jobs didn’t
mention it when he texted back inviting him to dinner. “It was my way of making sure Laurene
didn’t veto the plan,” Jobs joked. “It was my birthday, so she had to let me have Rupert over.”
Erin and Eve were there, and Reed jogged over from Stanford near the end of the dinner. Jobs
showed off the designs for his planned boat, which Murdoch thought looked beautiful on the
inside but “a bit plain” on the outside. “It certainly shows great optimism about his health that he
was talking so much about building it,” Murdoch later said.
At dinner they talked about the importance of infusing an entrepreneurial and nimble culture
into a company. Sony failed to do that, Murdoch said. Jobs agreed. “I used to believe that a really
big company couldn’t have a clear corporate culture,” Jobs said. “But I now believe it can be
done. Murdoch’s done it. I think I’ve done it at Apple.”
Most of the dinner conversation was about education. Murdoch had just hired Joel Klein, the
former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to start a digital curriculum
division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could
transform education. But Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be
blown away by digital learning materials.
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He
believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the
fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy
backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers
to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with
the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by
which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and
they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state
level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process
and save money.”
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